Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Metal Quietly Runs Our Lives

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Transition Metal Solutions

• Startup 2: Recupere Metals

• Startup 3: NextOre

This Metal Quietly Runs Our Lives

Remember copper from high school chemistry? That reddish-orange metal your teacher probably passed around as “the one that’s really good at conducting electricity”? Turns out, that unassuming little thing is quietly running almost everything around us right now, and the world is on the verge of running out of it.

The metal you never think about

Copper is in the wires powering our homes, the cables carrying electricity across cities, the motors inside our fridges, and the transformers keeping the grid alive.

It shows up in data centers that handle every AI search, in the factories that build everything from iPhones to fighter jets, and in pretty much anything that needs to move electricity from one place to another.

Why this omnipresence? Well, because nothing really matches its combination of conductivity, durability, and flexibility.

But here’s the thing: copper is only mined in a handful of countries, but it’s used everywhere. That makes it an easy target for tariffs, export bans, and trade fights. And when the politics get messy, prices go haywire.

Demand is going through the roof

Right now, we want more copper than ever. Three big reasons:

• Renewable energy. A solar or wind farm needs 2.5 to 7 times more copper than a gas or coal plant to produce the same amount of power. All those panels and turbines need long stretches of wiring to gather the electricity and bring it to one point. More renewables, more copper. Doesn’t mean we should stop the transition, btw!

• Electric vehicles. A regular car uses around 20 kg of copper. An EV uses over 50 kg. It’s there in the motor, the battery, the inverter, the wiring, and the charging equipment. As buses and trucks start going electric too, that number only climbs. Again, that transition is required!

• AI and data centers. This might be the biggest one yet. AI runs on computing, computing runs on data centers, and data centers are basically giant rooms of servers, cooling systems, power distribution units, and transformers, all of which need copper. We can probably cut some slack (or copper) here!

The supply can’t keep up

You’d think we’d just dig up more. Sure, there’s plenty of copper in the ground. The problem isn’t that it’s rare (yet); it’s that getting it out is difficult.

Permits take forever. The industry is struggling to find enough workers. And building a brand new mine? That’s a 20 to 30-year project, during which costs often balloon.

Then there are environmental hazards such as clearing large tracts of land, displacing tribes, and using limited water resources to run these mines.

So demand is skyrocketing, supply is stuck in slow motion, and the gap keeps widening.

What about replacements?

There are a few options, but they are not promising for now:

• Aluminum can step in for some jobs (like overhead power lines), but not most of them. Even in the best case, it could only cover about 2% of what copper currently does.

• Fiber optics is great at carrying data, better than copper, actually, but it can’t carry power. So they’re a partial fix at best.

• Newer materials like ultra-conductive aluminum, carbon nanotubes, and niobium phosphide show real promise. But they’re still deep in lab-coat territory, years away from showing up at scale.

So, for now, the world still needs copper. A lot of it. But we also need smarter ways to mine it, recycle it, and stretch every kilogram. Some brands are taking this challenge on.

But before we discuss them, here’s the quiz of the week:

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Transition Metal Solutions

Transition Metal Solutions thinks it can wring a lot more copper out of the same rock by helping the microbes that do the heavy lifting.

Microbes have long been essential to heap leaching, freeing copper from minerals so it can be refined. Transition Metal Solutions argues that the industry has been optimizing the wrong way, by isolating or engineering a few promising strains, growing them up, and then dumping them onto ore heaps.

The startup says that in reality, those microbes are not lone heroes. They live in complex communities where different organisms support one another, and boosting one strain only goes so far.

So Transition’s approach is to lift the whole community with mostly inorganic additives already present at many sites.

Even accounting for some drop-off outside the lab, it expects the impact to be meaningful. While traditional methods recover roughly 30% to 60% of the copper in ore, Transition aims for 50% to 70%, and possibly more.

Check out Transition Metal Solutions

Recupere Metals

Recupere Metals is scaling an innovation that produces high-conductivity copper electrical wire from 100% recycled feedstock.

By removing the need for smelting (extracting copper from ore) and refining (separating impure copper from pure copper), the process enables a smarter, more efficient route to producing copper winding wire while materially reducing GHG emissions.

Targeting the $30bn winding wire market, Recupere Metals will supply 100% recycled copper electrical winding wires to EV motor manufacturers, wind turbine manufacturers, and electrical component manufacturers.

Check Out Recupere Metals

NextOre

NextOre helps mines upgrade ore before it reaches the processing plant, so less rock is hauled, crushed, and treated for the same amount of metal.

With conventional mining, most material pulled out of the ground gets sent through crushers and grinders, even though a large share is waste rock. That means operators spend a lot of energy and money breaking down and processing material that never turns into saleable metal, while also creating more waste and using more water.

NextOre tackles this upstream with its Magnetic Resonance Analyser (MRA), a sensor adapted from medical MRI technology by Australia’s CSIRO. As ore moves past the scanner, the system measures it in real time and automatically kicks out low-grade material using a pneumatic reject.

The difference is simple: instead of processing everything and hoping the valuable part shows up later, NextOre sorts early, lifting head grade while cutting waste, water, and energy use, and helping mines stay productive even as ore grades decline.

Check out NextOre

Quiz answer: Chile

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you next week :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• The UN says We Are Going Bankrupt

• Quiz of the Week

• Startup 1: Boson White Water

• Startup 2: Epic CleanTec

• Startup 3: Membrion

The UN says We Are Going Bankrupt

But they aren’t talking about money

In January 2026, the United Nations released a report that used a word we usually hear in boardrooms and courtrooms: bankruptcy.

But they weren’t talking about money. They were talking about water.

The UN’s researchers said that the world has entered what they’re calling Global Water Bankruptcy.

That means we’ve been pulling water out of rivers, lakes, and underground reserves faster than nature can put it back. And in many places, the damage is now beyond full recovery.

Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water-insecure.

• Around 2.2 billion people don’t have access to safely managed drinking water.

• 3.5 billion lack proper sanitation.

• And about 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month every year.

More than half of the world’s large lakes have lost water since the early 1990s. Major rivers are failing to reach the sea. And 70% of the world’s major aquifers, the underground reserves we depend on, are declining.

Think of it like a bank account. You keep withdrawing, but the deposits have slowed to a trickle. The account still shows a balance, so everything looks fine. Until it doesn’t. That’s water bankruptcy.

Now, Let’s Talk About AI and Water

Here’s something most of us (including me) don’t think about when they ask AI a question or generate an image: it takes water to do that.

Every time you use an AI tool, the request goes to a data center, a massive building packed with thousands of computer chips, all running at full speed, all day, every day. That generates a lot of heat.

And to keep those chips from melting down, most data centers pump water through cooling systems. Lots of water.

How much? A single 1-megawatt data center can use around 26 million litres of water a year just for cooling.

Scale that up to a 30-megawatt facility, and you’re looking at hundreds of millions of litres, comparable to the yearly water use of tens of thousands of households.

Some companies are experimenting with seawater or closed-loop recycling systems, but fresh water is still the standard in most facilities. And the demand is only growing.

The global AI boom means more data centers, bigger data centers, and more water. Now here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

The Driest Places Are Building the Most Data Centers

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Gulf states are racing to become AI and cloud hubs. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, they’re all building data centers at speed.

MENA holds about 6.3% of the world’s population but only 1.4% of its renewable freshwater. It’s the most water-stressed region on the planet. Eleven of the 17 most water-stressed countries globally are in the MENA region.

Because there’s so little natural freshwater, countries like Kuwait (90%), Oman (86%), and Saudi Arabia (70%) rely heavily on desalination — turning seawater into drinking water.

That process is energy-intensive and can harm marine ecosystems through brine discharge. So every extra unit of water needed to cool AI infrastructure could also mean more emissions and more damage to coastlines.

In India, the picture is just as concerning. Cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore are the centres of India’s data centre boom, the same cities already dealing with water shortages, contaminated supply, and failing infrastructure.

India’s data center market is projected to exceed $100 billion by next year. Google, OpenAI, and others are pouring in gigawatts of capacity.

But these cities can barely keep taps running as it is.

A Note on Hypocrisy (Mine, Specifically)

I should be upfront about something. I use AI every day. I mostly use it to draft and organise my work.

Some of the writing for this very edition was done with AI tools. So, writing about how AI is making the water crisis worse while actively using it? Yeah, that’s a contradiction I’m sitting with.

But I don’t think the answer is to pretend it’s not happening or to swear off AI entirely.

AI is genuinely useful. It’s helping people do more with less, and it’s accelerating work in fields like climate science, healthcare, and clean energy.

One of my favorite stories was this: A man used AI to help make a cancer vaccine for his dog – an oncologist urges caution

Anyway, the problem isn’t AI itself. The problem is that the infrastructure behind AI, the data centers, the cooling systems, the energy grids, is being scaled up without enough thought about what it costs the places where it’s built.

So this isn’t an anti-AI newsletter. It’s a “let’s be honest about what’s happening” newsletter.

We can use AI and also demand that the companies building it take responsibility for its real-world footprint. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

And honestly, if you’re reading a newsletter about sustainability in 2026, you’re probably already someone who holds more than one truth at a time.

So What Can Actually Be Done?

That’s what the rest of this edition is about. Because while the problem is real and urgent, people are working on it. Brands building solutions for water treatment, conservation, and access, not in some distant future, but right now.

Let’s meet them, but before we do that, see if you can estimate this number below👇

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

According to the UN report mentioned above, women play a central role in household water provision, especially in rural areas. Instead of spending time on education, leisure, or income-generating activities, women and girls across the world collectively spend X hours every day collecting water.

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

Cities are running out of water, and we are draining groundwater faster than it can naturally recharge. That is why solutions that create new supply matter.

Boson White Water is doing that by turning treated sewage water into potable water through an 11-stage purification process, where each stage removes a different class of contaminants.

Instead of asking buildings to buy more tanker water, their system can be leased and installed in:

• 🏘️ Apartments

• 🏢 Offices

• 🛒 Shopping malls

When the lease costs less than the purchased water, the business case is straightforward.

And the impact is bigger than one building: it reduces pressure on freshwater sources and gives local aquifers a chance to recover.

Check out Boson White Water

Boson Whitewater tackles supply at the building level. Epic Cleantec takes a similar approach but goes further inside the building itself, treating and recycling wastewater on-site so it never has to leave.

Their onsite systems:

• Capture greywater and blackwater

• Treat it to high safety standards

• Reuse it for toilet flushing, cooling towers, and irrigation

The result is straightforward: buildings can cut potable water use by up to 90% for non-drinking purposes.

That means:

• Lower water bills

• Less strain on city water and sewer systems

• Greater resilience during droughts

• A smaller environmental footprint

And they go one step further.

Epic Cleantec also transforms solid waste into nutrient-rich soil products, helping close the loop beyond water reuse.

Check out Epic Cleantec

Where Boson and Epic Cleantec focus on residential and commercial buildings, Membrion applies the same principle, treat and reuse at the source, to industrial facilities, where water is often heavily contaminated with metals and chemicals.

Their on-site systems use:

• Electrical fields

• Ceramic desalination membranes

• A silica-gel-derived ceramic material (the same base material found in moisture-absorbing packets, engineered for water treatment)

The result is straightforward: facilities can recover usable water at the source while reducing disposal burdens.

That means:

• Lower operating costs

• Better compliance with stricter discharge and disposal regulations

• Less polluted water is released into the environment

Industrial sites depend on water to run day-to-day operations. But in many facilities, the loop looks like this:

• Clean water goes in

• Contaminated, metal-laden wastewater comes out

• And it gets discarded instead of being reused

That is why solutions that treat and recycle water on-site matter.

Check Out Membrion

Some Other Notable Water Solutions

1. Mimbly — A device that attaches to any washing machine to filter microplastics and reuse wash water, reducing water waste and plastic pollution.

2. High Sierra Showerheads — Engineered a single-nozzle showerhead that uses up to 40% less water without sacrificing pressure or comfort.

3. NetworkOcean — Builds underwater data centres cooled by natural ocean currents, eliminating freshwater consumption for AI infrastructure cooling.

Quiz answer: 250,000,000 hours

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you in two weeks :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• The Chain Reaction of the War

• Earplugs Grown from Mushrooms

• Bio-Based Materials, Starting with the Diaper

• Turning Fallen Leaves into Plates That Disappear

The Chain Reaction of the War

One of the many things that happened as a result of the Iran War was the increase in the prices of plastic. Plastic, like many other materials, is made from petrochemicals. So when the Strait of Hormuz was choked, and the petrochemical supply got disrupted, it also impacted the plastic supply chain.

Let’s get a little technical for a moment.

Plastic production depends on petrochemicals, which come from crude oil and natural gas. It starts with extracting and refining crude oil, which produces key feedstocks like naphtha, a lightweight hydrocarbon.

Next, naphtha is “cracked” in high-temperature units into smaller molecules like ethylene and propylene. Those are the basic building blocks for the two most common plastics: polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).

This matters because the Middle East, led by Saudi Arabia, supplies over 40% of global polyethylene exports. In effect, it is a major warehouse for the world’s plastics.

So when something goes wrong upstream, like the Strait of Hormuz getting choked during the Iran war, the shock travels quickly down the line.

Now we all hope that the ceasefire is respected and it continues, and we see more peaceful days. But the scenario also shows us how these black swan events can impact our daily lives. This is also a great time to push sustainable alternatives to plastics, ones that are not impacted by the movement of container ships across the globe. And here are 3 brands that are doing that.

Earplugs Grown from Mushrooms

The earplugs that you pick up at concerts, airports, factories, and pharmacies are made from PVC, a petroleum-based plastic. The world manufactures 40 billion of them every year, enough to wrap around the Earth nearly 100 times. And because they’re single-use, almost all of them end up in landfills.

GOB has created the world’s first 100% mycelium earplugs. It’s made entirely from the root structure of mushrooms. No plastic. No fossil fuels. No harmful chemicals.

How it works

GOB partners with Forager (by Ecovative), which grows mycelium foam on agricultural waste. The process can produce 3 million square feet of material per year on just one acre of land. The mycelium is shaped into earplugs that offer up to 20dB of noise protection with balanced acoustic dampening, meaning they block harmful noise while maintaining sound clarity.

The material has memory-foam-like properties, so it conforms to your ear shape without the pressure or irritation you get from traditional plugs.

Why it matters for the plastic crisis

Unlike PVC earplugs, GOB’s product is 100% home-compostable. When you’re done, it breaks down into soil nutrients — no landfill, no microplastics, no centuries-long decomposition. And because it’s grown from fungi, not extracted from oil, it is completely decoupled from the petrochemical supply chain that just got disrupted by the Strait of Hormuz.

Check out GOB

Bio-Based Materials, Starting with the Diaper

A disposable diaper is mostly plastic. The core ingredient that makes diapers absorbent is a material called superabsorbent polymers, or SAPs. They’re made from petroleum-derived plastics. Over 27 billion soiled diapers end up in U.S. landfills every year, where they take over 500 years to decompose. And as they break down, they release microplastics into the soil and water.

The global hygiene market that depends on these materials is valued at over $155 billion. All of it is running on the same petrochemical supply chain that just got choked by the Strait of Hormuz.

ZymoChem has built something that could change that. They’ve developed BAYSE™ Bio-SAP, a 100% bio-based and fully biodegradable superabsorbent polymer. Same performance. No petroleum.

How it works

ZymoChem uses a proprietary Carbon Conserving (C2) fermentation process. Think of it like brewing beer, but instead of making alcohol, their engineered microbes convert renewable corn sugar into high-performance materials, with near-zero CO₂ emissions during fermentation. Their process achieves yields up to 50% higher than other bio-manufacturing methods, which is what makes it cost-competitive with fossil-based SAPs.

The result is a drop-in replacement. That means diaper manufacturers don’t need to redesign their production lines. BAYSE™ slots right into existing factory setups, a detail that matters a lot when you’re trying to get big brands to switch.

Why it matters for the plastic crisis

Unlike petroleum SAPs, BAYSE™ is biodegradable and microplastic-free. It breaks down naturally instead of sitting in a landfill for centuries. And because it’s made from corn sugar, not crude oil, it doesn’t depend on naphtha shipments passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

In March 2026, ZymoChem announced that BAYSE™ became the first bio-based superabsorbent to match and outperform petroleum-based materials in third-party testing. In consumer trials, 88% of parents liked the absorbency, and 92% said they’d buy a diaper made with it.

Check out ZymoChem

Turning Fallen Leaves into Plates That Disappear

Single-use plastic plates and cutlery are everywhere. Weddings, street food stalls, office parties, festivals, and food delivery. Most of them are used for a few minutes. But they stay on the planet for hundreds of years. India alone generates millions of tonnes of plastic waste every year, and a big chunk of it comes from these single-use items. Even “paper plates” are often coated with plastic, which means they can’t be composted easily.

Agrileaf is solving this with something surprisingly simple: fallen areca palm leaves. Instead of cutting down trees, they collect naturally fallen leaves from farms. No plastic. No glue. No synthetic additives. Just leaves.

How it works

The fallen areca leaves are cleaned and heat-pressed into plates, bowls, and takeaway containers, shaped without chemicals, coatings, or adhesives. The factory, located in the arecanut-growing region of Karnataka, India, is operated by rural women using a fully organic approach. For their takeaway containers, Agrileaf uses a bio-based coating and heat sealing to make them leak-proof, tamper-proof, and resistant to sogginess for hours, engineered to work like modern food packaging without the plastic.

Why it matters for the plastic crisis

After use, Agrileaf’s products can be composted at home or buried in soil, where they break down naturally. No landfill, no microplastics, no centuries-long decomposition. And because the raw material is agricultural residue that would otherwise be burned or discarded, the entire supply chain is local and renewable, completely independent of the petrochemical infrastructure that just got disrupted.

Check out Agrileaf

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend and see you in two weeks :)

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• From Salt Farmers to Solar Engineers

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Blade-Made

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

From Salt Farmers to Solar Engineers

India produces 30 million tonnes of salt each year. 80% of it comes from the salt flats in the western state of Gujarat. The industry informally employs women to run this.

There are around 40000 women salt farmers, who use highly polluting diesel generators to pump brine to the surface from underground reservoirs.

Now diesel is expensive and polluting. In the 8 months of the year when they harvest salt, each woman uses approximately 1300 litres of diesel. This costs them 60% of their salaries, too.

A project led by Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) has replaced 7000 of these diesel generators with solar panels. SEWA is India’s largest union of poor women working in the informal sector.

These women not only use this solar power, but under a cooperative, they maintain it and even sell the extra power generated in the off-season (4 months) back to the grid.

The result:

• Their incomes have gone up by 600%.

• It saves 18900 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Blade-Made

Wind energy generation is on the rise. And that’s good news since we are moving to cleaner energy. But it’s also causing another stream of problems.

2 years ago, I actually wrote an article on that: Can Wind Turbines be Recycled?

Now, wind turbine blades don’t last forever. They have to be replaced every 20-25 years. These blades are made of glass/carbon fiber reinforced plastics (GRP). And we haven’t really figured out how to recycle them.

So instead of tossing them in landfills, Blade-Made is reusing them.

It’s converting them into outdoor furniture, facades, playgrounds, shelters, and street signs

A viable solution that gives these blades a new life until we find viable recycling methods.

Check out Blade-Made

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 Sea Forest: Makes a livestock feed additive using seaweed to slash livestock’s methane emissions.

🇫🇷 nextProtein: Insect-based protein for animal feed stocks.

🇪🇸 Voltrac: Automated electric tractor, built for hard work and harsher conditions.

🇿🇦 Plentify: Optimises home energy and load management.

🇩🇰 Nordic Salt Cycle: Recovers critical & strategic minerals with a low-cost, flexible & scalable molten salt process.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

⛏️ No more digging…Contrary to its neighboring country, Brazil, Colombia has decided not to approve any new oil or large-scale mining projects in its Amazon biome, which covers 42% of the nation’s land. There were a total of 43 oil blocks and 286 mining requests.

🤝🏽 Sustainable promises…Seychelles’ president-elect, Patrick Herminie, who came to power in the Indian Ocean nation on 26 October, has halted the construction of a controversial Qatari-funded luxury resort on an environmentally sensitive island.

🌞 Roof them up… Starting in November 2025, a national law in South Korea requires all parking lots with more than 80 spaces to install solar canopies and carports. The law applies to new as well as existing parking lots.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend :)

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Quiz answer: Brazil, which is also the world’s top coffee producer

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Using Old EV Batteries to Power Street Lights

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: ReMadrass

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Using Old EV Batteries to Power Street Lights

EVs are growing in popularity, and that’s a great thing. Their overall pollution is less than traditional gas cars, and there are no tailpipe emissions. Now, as we know, EVs run on batteries that can last for a couple of years before they no longer serve the EVs, even though they are not fully discharged.

The most convenient way to get rid of these half-used batteries would be to dump them in a landfill and forget about them and their environmental impact.

But we are beyond a point where we can do convenient things at the cost of the planet.

Jeju province in South Korea has realized this as well. It has started a pilot program to repurpose these EV batteries and use them for agricultural machinery and energy storage systems.

In fact, the program extends to 100 devices like farm equipment, transport robots, and streetlights that do not require a fully charged battery and can be powered by these repurposed batteries. The only condition is that these batteries should have at least 60% capacity.

These batteries also contain critical metals and minerals like nickel, cobalt, lithium, and manganese that have to be mined. Since they are mined, you can imagine the social and environmental impacts associated with them.

So South Korea is also working to raise its recycling rate for important minerals to 20% by 2030, anticipating an increase in retired EV batteries by the same year.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: reMadrass

When Lennert Hug found out that in Norway alone (with a population of 5.6 million), 750,000 mattresses are discarded annually, he knew something had to be done.

Lennert estimated that each mattress weighs an average of 21 kg, which results in an emission of 75 kg of CO2.

With around 3 million mattresses discarded in the Nordic region, that results in over 50,000 tons of waste, and almost 250,000 tons of CO2 emitted!

Lennert and team are solving this problem in Norway through their venture, ReMadrass (Madrass is a mattress in Norwegian). The first solution they offer is reusing existing mattresses.

• With partners like IKEA, they take used mattresses to their factories, inspect them, clean them using UV radiation, and a disinfecting shower.

• These mattresses are then packed and labeled with information sheets about the process they have undergone at ReMadrass.

• They are then sent back to the warehouses for sale and a further life.

The brand is also working to repair and resell mattresses that do not pass quality control for reuse.

• They will take in mattresses with minor defects, such as stains, broken zippers, or damaged covers.

• They will then replace the broken parts, like a torn cover, and send it back for reuse and sale, instead of sending it to the local recycling station.

For end-of-life mattresses that cannot be reused, ReMadrass is working on dismantling them, sorting different fractions, and delivering them for recycling locally. The foam from the mattress will be sent to a newly developed recycling factory for processing, production, and reuse.

All of this will ensure that mattresses stay out of landfills and we use as few materials as possible!

Check out ReMadrass

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇫🇷 Neo Trucks: Turns old diesel trucks into EVs by retrofitting them with an electric motor and a battery pack.

🇬🇧 Altilium: Extracting critical minerals from old EV batteries so that we don’t have to mine them anymore.

🇸🇽 Overstory: Uses AI-powered intelligence to help electric utilities cut the offending greenery back before it causes power outages or wildfires.

🇺🇸 Stony Creek Colors: Replacing harmful, synthetic colorants in our clothes with 100% traceable plant-based dyes.

🇳🇴 Flocean: On a mission to deliver affordable freshwater by desalination of deep ocean water.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

👕 Has someone worn it before?... Secondhand sales of clothes are growing faster than the new ones, and they are expected to hit $317 billion by 2028. While this is mostly supported by tariffs and inflation, and secondhand sales are still a tiny proportion of the overall fashion industry, I will take this as a win.

💪🏽 Still going strong… While the noise out there may say otherwise, a Harvard Business Review analysis of 75 global companies found that 53% are holding steady on sustainability commitments. What’s better is that 32% are even expanding on them, and just the remaining 8% are retreating.

💨 Let it blow… On November 11, 2025, Britain’s wind turbines set a new record, generating an impressive 22.7 gigawatts. That’s enough electricity to power 22 million homes!

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend :)

Share 🤷🏽‍♂️Not My Problem

Quiz answer: Australia

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• How One Mom Turned Diapers Into Climate Solutions

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Resting Reef

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

How One Mom Turned Diapers Into Climate Solutions

When Carrie Pollak had her first child, she realized it was time for a career change. A former Amazon manager with a keen interest in sustainability, Carrie wanted to create a business that mattered.

That chance came in 2018 when she noticed a small cloth diaper service called Diaper Stork for sale in Seattle. Diaper Stork, at that time, was running a cloth diaper cleaning and subscription service in the Seattle area, where it picked up and washed the soiled linens weekly through a subscription service.

And if you are wondering why that is sustainable, well, Americans toss 20 billion disposable diapers into landfills every year. One disposable diaper can take up to 500 years to degrade, and just one child goes through roughly 6,000 before potty training.

While cloth diapers are the most sustainable option, Carrie quickly realized they only serve about five percent of families. Most parents still want convenience, so she set out to find a solution that could reduce the environmental footprint of disposables.

Since 2023, Diaper Stork has offered compostable diapers to customers. But since soiled diapers cannot be home composted and most industrial composting facilities don’t accept them for sanitary reasons, Diaper Stork is composting these diapers themselves.

They do it in a pilot facility using pyrolysis, a high-heat process that transforms soiled diapers into biochar. This charcoal-like material can fertilize soil, purify water, and even remove pollutants from stormwater. They have even partnered with a Seattle coffee roaster and add leftover coffee chaff from them to optimize the process.

Their pilot composting facility is compact, housed in a 40-foot shipping container, designed to sit close to customers and reduce hauling emissions.

Carrie’s team has also tackled regulatory hurdles, securing grants and working within state guidelines to ensure human waste can safely be composted.

Diaper Stork is redefining how parents think about diapers. What was once just a messy necessity is now part of a climate-positive cycle, proving that even the most unlikely waste can have a second life.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Resting Reef

This brand helps you convert your loved one’s ashes into a reef — a sustainable way to honor their life.

Burial these days is less accessible. Cemeteries are running out of plots. Land is being allocated to other developments, leaving cremation as a default funeral choice. Unfortunately, it’s a carbon-intensive activity and harms the environment.

Resting Reef provides a compassionate alternative. One that’s sustainable as well.

• It uses aquamation, an alkaline process for cremation.

• It combines ashes with crushed oyster shells and concrete.

• The end result is an oyster reef, which mimics the natural reefs.

• These are anchored to the seabed at a depth of about 10 metres.

The reefs play a critical role in regenerating marine growth. They also filter water and prevent coastal erosion.

But we have lost a lot of them due to human activities. This solution aims to revive them. While helping you commemorate a loved one 💚

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇬🇧 29acacia: Transforms agricultural waste into high-performance, low-impact textiles.

🇩🇰 Elby: Creates EV charging solutions for city apartments.

🇸🇪 Kurb: Makes resale more accessible by bringing all known resale platforms in one place.

🇬🇧 Future Greens: Generates green energy from the byproducts of the food industry.

🇸🇪 endre: Help grid operators make smarter decisions in the world of an uncertain, rapidly changing energy landscape.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

⚓ Global High Seas Treaty Becomes Reality

After years of negotiation, the High Seas Treaty (aka the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction / BBNJ Agreement) has reached the required 60 ratifications and will formally enter into force in early 2026. This landmark agreement provides for legally binding protection and governance of marine biodiversity in international waters, enables the creation of marine protected areas, mandates environmental impact assessments, and promotes equitable access to marine genetic resources — all critical for ocean resilience and climate regulation.

📊 Brazil Turns Surplus Clean Energy into Opportunity

Brazil is seeing a boom in crypto mining powered by surplus renewable electricity — miners are negotiating to tap excess wind and solar energy that would otherwise go unused. These operations act as flexible “loads” that can absorb clean energy during off-peak periods, helping utilities monetize energy that might otherwise be curtailed.

🌊 Floating Solar in Indonesia Powers Clean Growth

In West Java, Indonesia has begun building a 92 MW floating solar plant on the Saguling Reservoir. Once operational (by November 2026), the plant will generate over 130 gigawatt-hours per year, cutting emissions by around 104,000 tons. This is part of Indonesia’s push to expand its renewable energy capacity to 42.6 GW by 2034, with solar contributing 17.1 GW.

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Quiz answer: Yemen

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Turning Shipping Containers Into Shelters

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Mimbly

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Turning Shipping Containers Into Homes

In Phoenix, Arizona (US), temperatures can soar upto 122F (50C). The homeless people in the city don’t have a lot of avenues to protect themselves from this scorching heat.

So the city has come up with an innovative solution: turning shipping containers into homes.

It’s creating safe, indoor spaces for around 80 homeless.

• It has started with four 40-foot steel converted shipping containers.

• They are further split into private 5-by-8-foot rooms, with one resident per room and upto 20 people per container.

• All of the containers offer central air conditioning powered by solar energy.

The solar panels are placed on top of all these containers.

The facility also has:

• Shared restrooms

• Showers

• Laundry services

And they also help the residents with workforce development, life skills programming, and companion animal services.

An innovative solution that lies at the crossroads of social issues and climate change. Something that can also be replicated by other cities around the world. I am sure we don’t have a shortage of discarded shipping containers!

Also reminds me of one of our go-to places when we were in Toronto — STACKT Market, which was also made using shipping containers.

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Mimbly

Our clothes are mostly made of synthetic fibers. So when we wash them, they release microplastics — those tiny plastic particles that are less than 5mm in size!

This Swedish startup is tackling that problem.

Side note: If you would like to read about synthetics in our clothes, here are a few articles I’ve written on that:

• Why Are So Many Workout Clothes Made of Plastic?

• Workout Clothes And Microplastics: What You Need To Know

• What Are Synthetic Clothes and Are They Really That Bad?

So, textiles account for upto 35% of microplastic pollution. Swedish startup Mimbly has made a device called Mimbox that solves that problem. It can be attached to any washing machine.

It filters the water used in the washing cycle — trapping the microplastics and preventing them from entering the environment.

It then analyzes the wastewater and, if it’s clean enough, it’s disinfected, stored, and used again in the next washing cycle. This helps to cut down on the water waste.

It also delays this water from entering the external water treatment plants, helping cut down emissions generated from treating the water.

Zoom out…Although individuals can use Mimbox, I think commercial laundry owners like laundromats, hotels, and hospitals would benefit the most from this, helping them cut down water usage, microplastic waste, and emissions that come from treating wastewater.

Extra…Since we are talking about microplastics and laundry, here’s another piece that might help you (mostly, U.S.-focused, but you’d get some tips that you can implement at your place, anywhere in the world: Simple ways to eliminate microplastics from your laundry.

Check out Mimbly

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 Banish: Tackles hard-to-recycle plastic and converts it into phone stands, earrings, and coaster packs.

🇺🇸 Mocean Energy: Uses wave energy to deliver clean, carbon-free, renewable energy.

🇫🇷 Pi POP: Instead of batteries, this e-bike uses supercapacitors - a more sustainable alternative.

🇺🇸 Replenysh: Makes it easier for brands to source and use recycled materials.

🇮🇳 PadCare: Makes sustainable periodcare products.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

⚡ Renewable Energy Blows Away Fossil Fuels

According to recent UN reports, renewable energy has reached a "positive tipping point" with over 90% of new capacity being cheaper than fossil fuels. In 2024, global renewable energy capacity expanded by nearly 20% to 582 gigawatts, with almost all new power capacity worldwide coming from renewables and nearly three-quarters of electricity growth generated from wind, solar, and other green sources.

🪵 Sweden's Wooden Wonderland

Stockholm Wood City, Sweden's ambitious timber metropolis, is under construction ahead of schedule, with plans to deliver 2,000 sustainable homes by 2027. Beyond using wood from Sweden's abundant forests (70% woodland coverage), this eco-friendly development will feature bike storage, a subway station, rooftop gardens, solar panels, and even neighborhood beehives. According to research, this approach could significantly reduce carbon emissions while creating spaces that enhance human well-being.

🚺 Pink Power in Motion

The Pink City Rickshaw Co. in Jaipur, India, is transforming lives by training and employing 200 women from low-income households as drivers of eco-friendly electric rickshaws. This innovative initiative by ACCESS Development Services provides women with financial independence as equity holders in their own company while offering tourists unique, sustainable tours of the walled city's attractions in custom-designed pink e-rickshaws.

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Quiz answer: Vienna, Austria

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Species Reappeared After a Century

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Pi-POP

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🦎 This Species Reappeared After a Century

Have you heard of geckos? I hadn’t, till I came across this piece. Geckos are small, carnivorous lizards, but they are slightly different from lizards — they have no eyelids and external ears like lizards.

Now in the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean, Mares’s leaf-toed gecko (Phyllodactylus maresi) was thought to be extinct for a while. The only evidence of their presence was ancient subfossil bones dating back 5,700 to 8,540 years.

The reason for their extinction: invasive species of rats. Rats that were likely brought by pirates or whalers in the 17th or 18th centuries. These rats ate gecko eggs, disrupted nesting sites, and disturbed the entire ecosystem of the island.

In 2011, a few organizations came together to do something in this regard. Galápagos National Park, along with NGOs Island Conservation, the Charles Darwin Foundation, and The Raptor Center, launched a precision rodent eradication program. They targeted every invasive rat species.

Soon after the removal of rats, the ecosystem started reviving! The park rangers spotted a nocturnal gecko with distinctive leaf-shaped toe pads aka the Mares’s leaf-toed gecko.

People often imagine that nature may take a long time (20-50 years or more) to respond. But, when the correct pressures are removed, this is not always true,” Paula Castaño, Island Conservation’s impact program manager, told Mongabay in an email. “We often see these changes happening quickly, sometimes just in one or two years.

Shows how resilient nature is and how quickly it can take over. If we support it, it will revive quickly. If we don’t, it might take some time, but it will — the choice is ours!

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Pi-POP

This might look like a normal bike. But this is something between a bike and an e-bike!

Instead of batteries, this bike from French startup Pi-POP uses supercapacitors. These are quick-charging and long-lasting energy storage devices.

If you would like to dive deeper into the tech, here’s a relevant article.

This is how it works:

• Whenever you pedal on easy terrain, roll downhill, or brake, it captures energy and stores it electrostatically, not chemically.

• When you need more power, like climbing a hill or starting, that stored power kicks in.

A well-charged supercapacitor can handle about 50 m of elevation gain – enough for roughly 80 percent of European cities’ rides.

Unlike e-bikes, this one does not need any

• Rare-earth mining

• Lithium batteries

• Overnight charging.

The supercapacitor has a lifespan of 10 to 15 years vs the typical five to six years for typical lithium packs, making it a sustainable and economical urban mobility alternative!

Check out Pi-POP

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇨🇭 PeelPack: Uses potato peels to make plastic-free containers.

🇬🇧 Resting Reef: Helps you convert your loved one’s ashes into a reef.

🇮🇳 Bambrew: Harnesses the power of plant fibers and pulp to create packaging material.

🇩🇪 Soapbottle: Soap bars that are designed to last at least two months.

🇺🇸 Mycocycle: Uses fungi to transform construction waste into low-carbon raw materials.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Smart Data Centers on a Budget

Estonian researchers have created mini data centers by linking old smartphones together, costing just $9 per phone. This innovative approach could significantly reduce electronic waste from billions of discarded phones while decreasing the need for expensive, energy-intensive data centers.

Brewing a Greener Future

Heineken is cooling down its carbon footprint by heating up differently - replacing gas boilers with biomass, biogas, and solar-thermal systems across European breweries. Their Seville facility alone generates 68 MWh of stored heat, preventing 1,300+ metric tons of carbon emissions annually.

Duckweed Dives into Protein Market

Plantible Foods has launched its 100-acre Texas factory, "The Ranchito," now producing hundreds of metric tons of duckweed-based Rubi Protein. This nutrient-rich "water lentil" packs 40% protein with a nutty spinach flavor and might be the most abundant protein source on the planet.

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Quiz answer: 91%

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• They Wanted A Sustainable Wedding Card

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Roha Biotech

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

They Wanted A Sustainable Wedding Card

Back in 2016, Garima Capoor and Sumat Nanda were looking for a more sustainable wedding card. They wanted to avoid the typical "funky grand" wedding cards. Instead, they wanted something that could be enjoyed long after the wedding and would not end up in a landfill.

When they could not find anything, they decided to create their own, using seed paper — basic vegetable seeds embedded in handmade paper made from upcycled cotton scrap.

When the wedding guests started sharing the photos of the plants sprouting from their invitations, the couple knew that they were onto something. In 2018, they started Plantables with their first product, a plantable desk calendar.

Today, it offers a wide range of products, including notebooks, carry bags, and postcards, all of which are made from materials that grow into plants. To make these products, Plantables works with women from economically challenged backgrounds.

It was the first brand in India to introduce the concept of Plantable Rakhi (a Hindu Festival) in 2019. It also worked with brands like Guns N’ Roses and Coldplay during their India concert and made plantable guitar picks, made from basil seed embedded in upcycled cotton scrap paper and plantable tags, making sure every product creates a new life!

Check out Plantables

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Roha Biotech

Bubble wraps and packaging foams take centuries to decompose. So this Indian startup is building a sustainable alternative to them using mushrooms…

Pick up any online order that you get. You’ll mostly find plastic packaging in that — sometimes in the form of bubble wrap or maybe some kind of foam.

Even if you dispose of them correctly, they will mostly end up in landfills or will be incinerated.

Roha Biotech is solving this problem. It uses mycelium, aka mushroom roots. They’re sustainable, functional, and readily biodegradable. It then mixes it with agricultural residue, and the result is Mycelium Packaging, which is:

✅ 100% biodegradable.

✅ Plastic-free, chemical-free, and purely natural.

✅ Industrially durable and protective.

It can be used in a range of industries, from personal care to electronics. Unlike plastic, this goes back to nature, leaving behind no trace.

Check out Roha Biotech

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 RecycleSmart: Recycles hard-to-recycle stuff for individuals and businesses.

🇬🇧 AUAR: A complete construction platform for sustainable, high-quality housing.

🇮🇳 Ecoyaan: A sustainable marketplace that uses AI to verify product sustainability claims.

🇬🇧 Buy Me Once: A platform where you’ll only find long-lasting products.

🇨🇭 Bloom Biorenewables: Converts biopolymers like cellulose & lignin into added-value chemical products.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

Timber Trouble: Two men in Himachal Pradesh, India, faced hefty fines after locals recorded them illegally cutting down trees in the village forest and exposed their chainsaw operation on social media.

Goodbye Gas: Vietnam will ban gasoline motorcycles in downtown Hanoi starting July 1, 2026, followed by a gradual expansion to include cars and other districts, as part of an emissions reduction initiative.

Climate Crackdown: In a groundbreaking advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice declared climate change an "existential threat," ruling that countries must meet their climate obligations.

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Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend. Taking a break from work next week, so I will see you the week after :)

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Quiz answer: Sweden

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• It All Started With An MBA Project

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: RecycleSmart

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🚌 It All Started With An MBA Project

In 2011, Eva, Alejandro, and Rui were part of the MBA program at IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. One of the projects that they were working on as part of their course was to propose an idea that would disrupt a traditional industry.

At that time, Alejandro was also working as the CEO of a third-generation motorcoach operator in Spain. Being aware of how the industry operates, he suggested the “commute to work” problem.

The commute to work is a challenge for companies to solve. Unless you have batches of people coming in and leaving at the same time every day, how can you optimize it?

Add to it factors like hybrid work, door-to-door pickup, and multisite visits, and you can see why the problem is so complicated and, well, unsustainable (from an emissions perspective).

Eva and Rui had experience in innovation and strategic operations consultancy, and agreed that this whole commute to work model can be more efficient. And that’s how their project, “Busit your way” was born.

One thing led to another, and in 2015, these 3 were joined by Danilo, CEO of a Motorcoach Operator in Brazil, to the founding team

And finally, BusUp launched in 2015 with an aim to create more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable shuttle programs.

The brand manages Corporate Mobility Programs with the help of technology.

The company tailors the commute to work program for every company. Whether it’s hybrid or in-person, door-to-door pickup or clubbing employees from different companies into a shared bus route, BusUp has all the solutions.

• This helps to bring down the costs for the company.

• Reduces the stress on employees.

• Brings down the number of cars on the streets.

Making it easy for everyone on the planet.

Check out BusUp

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: RecycleSmart

Recycling is one of the most common ways to get rid of your stuff. But recycling across the world is broken. The recycling systems haven’t been able to keep up with the evolving products and packaging.

They can’t handle stuff like e-waste, textiles, kitchen items, blister packs, batteries, and vapes. So these products end up in landfills and sit there for decades, if not centuries.

RecycleSmart is solving this problem for Australians. It’s making recycling easy and accessible for everyone.

So what can you recycle with them? Well, anything that’s dry and you're not sure what to do with it.

• RecycleSmart picks it up from your home or business

• They then sort all of this tricky waste by hand.

• And works with vetted partners who can recycle or reuse them.

For instance,

♻️ Soft plastics are turned back into oil or asphalt additives.

♻️ Wearable clothes are donated to local charities.

♻️ Gold, silver, copper, and rare earth metals are extracted from your e-waste.

Their only condition: they pick up dry and reasonably clean stuff. No food, no organic, liquid, hazardous, or dangerous materials. That’s fair!

Solving this tricky waste problem is no easy feat.

Check out RecycleSmart

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇮🇳 Jhappi: Helping individuals & institutions to buy & gift more mindfully.

🇮🇳 Onedotfive: Infusing planet-friendly practices like natural dyeing into everyday clothes

🇦🇪 Carbonmark: Scaling climate finance with a global carbon credits marketplace.

🇺🇸 Aircela: A fridge-sized machine that makes gasoline out of thin air.

🇺🇸 Clean Composting: A paper-pulp container designed for quick and easy composting.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🧤 All in one: Sustainable apparel brand Patagonia has integrated its Worn Wear trade-in service into its main website, making it easier to buy and sell used clothes.

⚰️ RIP: A man in Maine, US, was laid to rest in a mushroom casket, instead of wood and concrete that is used in traditional burials.

🐮 A better alternative: Karnataka Milk Federation in India is experimenting with new biodegradable milk packets that break down naturally within 90 days(as opposed to 500 years for a plastic one).

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Quiz answer: Mexico

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• She Asked for a Repair. They Said, “Buy New.”

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Aircela

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🤷🏽‍♀️ She Asked for a Repair. They Said, “Buy New.”

So She Built This Instead.

It started with a favorite pair of pants and a ripped seam.

When Agnes Weber’s go-to trousers gave out, she reached out to the brand, hoping for a quick fix. What she got instead was a generic 10% discount on a new pair.

“That felt so impersonal,” she remembers. “Why didn’t they just help me fix what I already loved?”

That small moment of frustration and disappointment set Agnes on a new path. Instead of buying new, she envisioned a future where brands stood behind their products long after the sale, where repair wasn’t a last resort, but a built-in service.

That’s how MENDED was born: a repair platform that helps fashion brands in the Netherlands and Germany give new life to worn clothes and build stronger connections with their customers.

What started with a single ripped seam has now become a movement.

Through MENDED, brands are turning repair into a premium service that brings people back into stores, builds brand loyalty, and keeps clothes out of landfills.

“Repair isn’t just good for the environment,” Agnes says. “It’s good for business too.”

Check out MENDED

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Aircela

This team has created a fridge-sized machine that turns air and water into real gasoline using renewable electricity.

Aircela is a carbon-capturing machine that, well, captures carbon from the atmosphere and converts it into engine-ready gasoline. All this is done using three ingredients: air, water, and renewable electricity.

Here’s how it works:

• Capturing Carbon from the Air: Aircela’s machine uses a water-based solution containing potassium hydroxide (KOH) to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly from ambient air. Air flows through a specially designed chamber where it contacts the liquid sorbent, efficiently capturing CO₂.

• Producing Hydrogen from Water: Using electrolysis, powered by renewable electricity, water (H₂O) is split into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is kept for fuel synthesis; the oxygen is safely released. At the same time, the sorbent used in the capture step is regenerated for reuse, allowing the cycle to run continuously.

• Synthesizing Fuel: The captured CO₂ and hydrogen are combined to create methanol. That methanol is then converted into gasoline through a two-step catalytic process known as methanol-to-gasoline (MTG). The result is fossil-free, engine-ready gasoline, fully compatible with existing engines and infrastructure.

Now, of course, when this gasoline is burned in any internal combustion engine, it releases CO2 again. But since it’s coming from recirculating carbon that was already in the atmosphere, it’s not adding more carbon (or using any fossil fuels to do that).

Aircela could be placed in households, creating a rooftop gas station, or they could be set up in a solar farm, replacing the need to go to gas stations.

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇦🇺 Uluu: Using seaweed to create a plastic alternative.

🇫🇮 Resiclo: Converting plastic waste into new raw materials.

🇫🇷 Poppins: Helping people to borrow or rent stuff from neighbors.

🇮🇳 Roha Biotech: Using mushrooms to create a plastic packaging alternative.

🇬🇧 Buy Me Once: Making it easy to find stuff that lasts.

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😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

1️⃣ Pakistan's Power Play Goes Off-Grid

Facing scorching 120°F heat, soaring bills, and an unreliable grid, Pakistanis aren't waiting for solutions — they're creating them. In just three years, solar energy jumped from 4% to 14% of electricity generation as everyday citizens, from farmers to city dwellers, installed cheap Chinese panels to escape blackouts and cut costs. This grassroots revolution, born of necessity rather than environmental ideology, is transforming lives with reliable cooling, irrigation, and cleaner air (no more diesel generators!).

2️⃣ Riding the Wave: Scotland's Tidal Triumph Makes Quite a Splash!

Off Scotland's coast, a remarkable tidal turbine has been quietly making history, operating continuously underwater for over 6.5 years without a hitch. Part of the MeyGen project, this durability milestone proves tidal energy's viability in harsh conditions. With four turbines already powering about 7,000 homes and plans for 130 more, this predictable clean energy source offers advantages over weather-dependent alternatives.

3️⃣ The Bag-gage Fee That Cleaned Up Town

Plympton, Massachusetts, turned its trash problem into treasure by switching to a "pay-as-you-throw" system that charges per garbage bag, rather than a flat fee. The results were dramatic: trash output nearly halved from 640 to 335 tons annually, saving the town $65,000 and reducing landfill emissions. By making waste costs visible, the system naturally encouraged recycling and composting without unfairly burdening smaller households.

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Quiz answer: Lisbon

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• From an Ad Writer to Fighting Overconsumption

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Vok Bikes

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

From an Ad Writer to Fighting Overconsumption

Tara Button was writing TV ads in the early 2010s. Ads that pushed people to buy new stuff. While writing these ads, she also became an impulsive shopper, buying things that she was writing about — easy to fall into that trap. You or I would probably have done the same things.

On her 30th birthday, Tara’s sister Jules gifted her a Le Creuset cooking pot. If you are coming across Le Creuset for the first time, you’re not alone! It’s a French-Belgian maker of cookware, and its products are meant to last!

Every time Tara used the pot, she had the same feeling:

If only all my possessions were like this, I’d never have to replace anything. In fact, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to trust everything we bought not to let us down and end up as landfill. Think of the environmental benefits!

After pondering over this for months, she built a basic website and decided to call it Buy Me Once. She started reading the fine print behind products and slowly curated a list of products that would last — you buy them once and then just continue using them.

In 2016, a tweet and eventually an article in The Telegraph made Buy Me Once viral enough to convince Tara to leave her full-time job and spread the Buy Me Once mission.

By 2017, the website had 2000 products, and Tara had a book deal with Harper Collins.

Fast forward to today:

• On the website, you would only find long-lasting products that the team can stand behind.

• They examine the products themselves, their manufacturing story, and develop meaningful relationships with the makers before listing the products on the site.

• If they find that a product is not up to scratch, they immediately take it off the website. It also offers exclusive warranties on the products.

Here are some of the cool, durable products I discovered on Buy Me Once:

Check out Buy Me Once

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Vok Bikes

European nations (and North American ones as well) use a lot of vans. These vans have ample cargo capacity and are used for last-mile deliveries, restaurant deliveries, fresh goods supplies, facility management, and are even used by municipalities. But,

66% of these vans operate with less than half of their cargo space used.

They are taking up space in urban centers are creating unnecessary emissions.

The solution:

Vok Bikes are a durable, low-maintenance, and agile alternative to vans. According to the brand, these electric cargo bikes have:

• 44% faster delivery time

• 64% more cost efficient

• 95% less CO₂ than a petrol car

The compact design of the bike makes it easy to park anywhere without blocking traffic, and it can easily navigate through restricted zones as well.

These bikes now operate in 14 European countries and are used by brands like IKEA, which offers Vok bikes for customer rentals in Utrecht and Stockholm.

Solving the urban logistics challenge, one bike at a time!

Check out Vok Bikes

✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇬🇧 Elvis & Kresse: Using rescued fire hoses to make bags.

🇫🇮 Stora Enso: Making batteries out of wood.

🇫🇷 Planet of the Grapes: Converting waste from winemaking into bags and belts.

🇺🇸 KENT: World’s first compostable underwear.

🇦🇺 BearHug: Reusable pallet wraps to replace single-use plastic.

😹 3 Stories That Lifted My Spirits This Week

• Modhera in Gujarat has become India’s first village fully powered by solar energy day and night, thanks to over 1,300 rooftop panels, solar carports, and a 15 MWh battery system.

• DJI drones are revolutionizing trash collection on Mount Everest by completing in just six minutes what takes Sherpas four hours of dangerous hiking.

• Ranchers in Mexico are transforming from jaguar hunters to conservationists. Through the Viviendo con Felinos program, they now earn thousands of dollars for documenting wild cat sightings on their land around the Northern Jaguar Preserve in Sonora.

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Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Switzerland

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• I Was About to Buy Another Pair of Shoes… Then I Tried This

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Uluu

• 5 Brands Creating Low-Waste Cleaning Solutions

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

I Was About to Buy Another Pair of Shoes… Then I Tried This🥾☕

After I am done petting my cats in the morning, I move to making coffee. We have a drip machine, and since both of us love black coffee, it works perfectly for us.

Earlier, a part of the coffee-making process involved discarding the used coffee grounds every morning. But recently, I discovered a practical use for them.

I now put them in my gym shoes.

Currently, it's monsoon season in Goa. My extremely sweaty gym shoes don't get sufficient time to dry before I need to wear them again. One solution was to buy another pair and alternate between the two — a quick and convenient option, I must admit. However, I only use these shoes at the gym and nowhere else. Having two pairs didn't make sense. Plus, I'm trying to minimize my possessions, so this approach didn't align with that philosophy either.

After some quick research, I found a better way to dry those shoes and eliminate that unpleasant odor. You guessed it right — I began putting used coffee grounds in my shoes. But not directly — that would create quite a mess.

There's a process to it. I keep two containers in our kitchen. I empty the used coffee grounds into one of them, and once they dry out, I transfer them to another container. You can't use wet coffee grounds as they won't absorb moisture, and they might replace the sweat smell with a dark roast aroma 😛

Afterward, I place these dried coffee grounds in an old pair of socks (without holes) and put these coffee-filled socks in my shoes overnight.

You can then remove the used coffee grounds, dry them again, and continue the process. These coffee-filled socks can also help eliminate odors from storage boxes and closets, if needed.

Let me know if you've been using your coffee grounds in other creative ways. I would love to experiment.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Uluu

This Australian startup is using seaweed to tackle the plastic crisis…

Plastic Awakening…Dr Julia Reisser was an ecologist and researched sea turtles in her native Brazil. During her research, Julia realized how sea turtles were eating more plastic than anything else. This led her to do a PhD in ocean plastics, followed by a stint at The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch not-for-profit developing technology to remove plastic from the seas, where she was one of the earliest members.

Seaweed Solution…But Julia wanted to move to the source of the problem — plastics. When she did not find any persuasive alternatives to plastics, she decided to create one with Michael Kingsbury, a former business executive and M&A lawyer. Together, they launched Uluu, which is on a mission to make all the world’s plastics out of seaweed.

But why seaweed?

Seaweeds are amazing at restoring our oceans. They not only remove carbon from the atmosphere but also clean up nutrient pollution that causes havoc in our marine environments.

Uluu’s compostable polymer, called polhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), is made through a fermentation process that is similar to brewing beer. This is their 4-step process:

1. Cook seaweed. Extract sugars from seaweed using special enzymes.

2. Ferment PHAs. Feed seaweed sugars to PHA-producing microbes.

3. Extract PHAs. Remove PHAs from inside the microbes.

4. Make pellets. Melt the PHAs to make pellets ready for product manufacturing.

These pellets can be used in industries like fashion, furniture, and packaging.

Sustainable Byproducts…At the end of the process, there’s a leftover seaweed biomass with higher protein content and greater digestibility. ULUU has partnered to use this vegan by-product as an alternative to fishmeal in aquaculture feed. It’s also exploring developments in other areas such as soil treatment, pet food, and protein for human consumption.

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✅ 5 Brands Creating Low-Waste Cleaning Solutions

🇮🇳 Arani Ecosteps- A plastic-free store for personal care and household products.

🇺🇸 Cleancult- Non-toxic household cleaning products that are good for humans and the planet.

🇨🇦 Etee- Cleaning and personal care products in the form of concentrates.

🇨🇦 Myni- Low waste cleaning and personal care products.

🇮🇳 Bare Necessities- Makes low-waste personal, home care & lifestyle products.

😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌳 City Slick-ers: Urban Climate Heroes!

Cities are outperforming national governments in addressing climate change, with 75% of major cities reducing emissions faster than their countries, achieving an average 7.5% drop from 2015 to 2024. Urban leaders are taking practical steps like planting trees, electrifying transit, and improving walkability in direct response to climate threats, though they face a massive funding gap of $4.5 trillion annually needed by 2030 to meet climate goals.

🚲 Wheel-y Making a Difference!

The global Bicycle Mayor Network is revolutionizing urban transit through a grassroots approach where local cycling champions advocate for bike-friendly cities. After learning to ride during the pandemic, Maren Ahlers now leads a 450-member cycling group in Addis Ababa and has joined this 150-member coalition spanning 34 countries. Despite being volunteers facing bureaucratic hurdles, these advocates are achieving tangible results, including Ethiopia's commitment to build 100 kilometers of new bike lanes.

🌊 Making Waves in Conservation

Samoa has made a groundbreaking conservation move by becoming one of the first Pacific Island nations to legally protect 30% of its ocean. They've adopted a binding Marine Spatial Plan that ensures sustainable management of their entire 120,000-square-kilometer ocean territory. Cabinet-endorsed under the Lands, Survey and Environment Act 1989, this plan sets a powerful example for other large ocean states looking to protect their marine resources. Samoa's achievement puts them ahead of schedule for the 2025 UN Ocean Conference targets.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Samsung

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Turning Discarded Construction Debris into Public Furniture

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Repair Rebels

• 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Upcycling Waste

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🏗️ Turning Discarded Construction Debris into Public Furniture

Let’s talk about construction waste — timber beams, concrete chunks, and other salvaged building elements. We are demolishing and building new buildings at a rapid pace, across most cities in the world. As a result, we generate a lot of construction waste. This waste mostly ends up in landfills and sits there for decades or even centuries.

The situation is no different in Stockholm, Sweden. But designer Nicholas Niemen has decided to give this waste a second life, through his project X-TRAKOJAN, which turns discarded construction debris into something beautiful, functional, and meaningful.

Nicholas started by gathering leftover materials from construction sites around Stockholm and assembling these fragments into a striking X-shaped structure

It allows locals and tourists to pause, sit, and connect with their surroundings at Stockholm’s port.

It’s a great example of how art, architecture, and sustainability can come together. These places are also a great conversation starter about how we build, discard, and reuse in our cities.

Something that cities around the world can take a cue from and create their own version of it. Have you seen something similar in your own city?

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Repair Rebels

Want to fix your clothes, shoes, or bags? This German startup has built a one-stop solution for that…

Fix, Don't Ditch…We live in a linear economy where it’s easy to buy new stuff, use it for sometime and discard it. And then completely forget about it. A more sustainable option is to get our stuff repaired, which increases its life, keeps it out of landfills, and prevents a new product from being manufactured.

Stitch In Time…But repairing isn’t convenient, especially when you compare it to buying new stuff. German startup Repair Rebels is solving this problem by combining tech with traditional craft people, such as tailors, cobblers, and leather workers, who have no digital presence.

Here’s how it works:

🛠️ Customers can book and pay for their repair online.

🛠️ They can then send their products to Repair Rebels.

🛠️ Products are repaired and sent back to them.

Making it convenient for customers while being:

🌝 Good for the planet.

👜 Good for their wallet.

💼 Good for the local economy.

Repair Rebels also works with brands and retailers who are passionate about sustainable fashion.

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Upcycling Waste

🇸🇬 WasteX: Helps farmers transform their agricultural waste into a valuable product.

🇳🇴 Wastefront: Converts worn-out tires to other useful products.

🇺🇸 Wastefuel: Transforms municipal solid waste into sustainable aviation fuel.

🇬🇧 Neverwaste: Converts waste cardboard into wooden-looking boards.

🇺🇸 Wasted: Makes recycled fertilizer from the nutrients in your pee instead of letting them go to waste.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🦭 Seal the Deal: The Netherlands' new Wadden Ecomare Centre has opened, replacing the 1971 Pieterburen facility. Led by Sander van Dijk, it treats 200 seals yearly, mostly separated "howler" pups and victims of debris or vessel collisions. The upgraded center houses 70 seals with 12 intensive-care units and uses natural seawater to improve fur health and accelerate wound healing.

🏡 "House Cooling" Effect: In British Columbia, nonprofit housing groups are revolutionizing affordable living by building climate-resilient homes that simultaneously address housing affordability and climate change impacts. With rents as low as $775 and carbon emission reductions up to 90%, these innovative projects provide protection from extreme weather while demonstrating how smart housing policy can serve as a blueprint for cities worldwide.

🌊 Bag Ban Bonanza: A recent study provides compelling evidence that plastic bag bans effectively reduce coastal litter. Researchers found that areas with plastic bag policies showed a 25-47% reduction in plastic bags as a percentage of total litter collected compared to areas without such regulations. Complete bans or fees proved more effective than partial bans, and statewide regulations outperformed local ones.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Ireland

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Country Takes Historic Stand Against Ultra-Fast Fashion

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Tereform

• 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Redefining Fashion

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🚫 This Country Takes Historic Stand Against Ultra-Fast Fashion

There are fast fashion companies like H&M and Zara that are known for launching new designs every week. And then there are ultra-fast fashion companies like Shein and Temu, which offer you more styles every time you refresh your screen. They are essentially fast fashion companies on steroids. Here’s an article that I wrote on ultra-fast fashion around 2 years ago, if you’d like to dive deeper:

What is Ultra-Fast Fashion? And How Can We Avoid It?

France has become the first company to target these ultra-fast fashion giants officially. In June 2025, it passed a bill that introduces eco-taxes, ad bans, and sustainability rules to tackle overconsumption and textile waste from brands like Shein and Temu.

Here’s a breakdown of the bill, which could become a law in September 2025:

1️⃣ Environmental surcharge on fast fashion items:

• Each item sold by ultra-fast fashion would incur a €5 tax, which would increase to €10 by 2030.

• This surcharge would be kept at 50% of the retail price to keep things affordable.

• Revenue from this surcharge would be used to support sustainable French fashion brands.

• This would make their products more affordable and accessible.

2️⃣ A ban on advertising ultra-fast fashion brands

• No advertising on social media platforms — the ban extends to influencer marketing as well, so no more shopping hauls.

• Influencers could face sanctions if they break the rules.

• This would reduce the appeal of ultra-fast fashion and overconsumption.

3️⃣ Retailers need to disclose environmental information with their products

• This includes details like carbon emissions, resource usage, and recyclability.

• All clothes will come with an eco-score.

• The lower the eco-score, the higher the taxation and penalties the brand must pay.

While the bill is a great step in the right direction, all these rules don’t apply to European brands like Zara. I hope it becomes more inclusive in the future.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Note: Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Tereform

Your clothes contain multiple materials — fabrics, prints, finishes, and dyes. This makes them difficult to recycle. This duo is tackling this challenge.

Thread Alert…Tons of textiles are discarded every second. They mostly end up in landfills or incinerators because they are hard to recycle. That’s because clothes are made of blended material. Pick up any garment and check out its textile label. You would mostly see different materials. A lot of them, like polyester, spandex, and nylon, are actually made of plastic. On top of that, some prints and dyes make recycling even more complicated.

Why Do Clothes End Up in Landfills?

Tereform is solving this problem.

👕 Its recycling technology uses the oxygen in the air and earth-abundant metals.

👕 This breaks down synthetic textiles into their original chemical building blocks.

👕 The end result is the powdered plastic that can be reused.

Thread Ahead…This prevents this plastic from ending up in landfills and reduces the need for new plastic. Tereform is extending this to other industries such as automotive, apparel, and home goods as well, creating an even bigger impact!

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That Are Redefining Fashion

🇺🇸 👖 unspun: Creating low-waste on-demand jeans.

🇩🇪 🪡 Repair Rebels: A one-stop solution to fix your clothes, shoes, and bags.

🇺🇸 🥼 AmorSui: Washable, recyclable, and more sustainable PPE kits.

🇮🇳 🐢 Jiwya: A 100% plant-based slow fashion brand.

🇬🇧🪡 Circulo: Making clothing repair as convenient and easy as buying new clothes.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🍃 A Wing and a Prayer: While wind turbines pose less risk to birds than everyday hazards like windows, they remain a concern for vulnerable species like raptors and seabirds. Scientists and engineers are exploring various solutions, from striped blade painting to AI-powered collision detection, to fix that problem. Some other experts are recommending ideas like strategic site placement and temporary shutdowns during migration periods to reduce bird fatalities.

🪵 Gibbon a Second Chance: In Java, Indonesia, the endangered Javan Gibbon population has dwindled to around 4,000 due to deforestation, hunting, and habitat fragmentation. Local NGO SwaraOwa is tackling this crisis by working with communities to create "forest corridors" — connecting isolated forest patches to help gibbons and other species move freely and find mates, while young farmers in a nearby village are leading reforestation efforts by growing native seedlings.

🚲 Pedal to the Metal(lic Air): Paris has undergone a dramatic transformation under Mayor Anne Hidalgo since 2014, banning cars from over 100 streets and replacing thousands of parking spots with bike lanes. This bike-friendly revolution has paid off significantly, with air pollution levels dropping by approximately 50% compared to 2005 levels.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Pakistan

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• How Solar Panels Are Giving New Life to Birds

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: auum

• 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌞🦅 How Solar Panels Are Giving New Life to Birds

Solar energy isn’t just good for the grid — it’s turning out to be a lifeline for wildlife. Across Germany, solar parks are quietly transforming into biodiversity hotspots, with birds like larks, wagtails, and wheatears thriving among the panels. In places where intensive farming has pushed species to the edge, these fenced, low-disturbance areas are offering a second chance.

Take one of Germany’s largest solar parks near Berlin, for example. Biologist Matthias Stoefer counted record-breaking numbers of breeding larks there—up to 47 pairs per 10 hectares.

That’s more than six times the number found on nearby farmland, where constant spraying and harvesting leave little room for successful nesting. What’s even more surprising is that larks usually avoid vertical structures.

But here, the orderly rows of panels don’t seem to faze them.

These parks are doing more than just sitting there and soaking up the sun. Sheep graze between the rows, keeping the grass short and fertilizing the land naturally.

This creates a rich buffet of insects for the birds and fosters a mosaic of microhabitats — from sandy trails to shady green patches under the panels.

Over time, with minimal human interference and careful management, these areas become surprisingly rich ecosystems.

And it's not just larks.

Rare birds like the wheatear are showing up again, along with buntings, shrikes, and even red kites circling overhead. As solar parks mature, they quietly outdo neighboring agricultural land in terms of wildlife value.

With the right design and care, solar parks can pull double duty — clean energy above, thriving biodiversity below. Who knew saving the planet could come with birdsong?

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: auum

This machine makes it easier for office employees to reuse their cups and glasses.

A lot of companies still use disposable cups. An office employee has ~2-3 drinks per day. Now, consider a mid-sized company office of 100 employees. That would be 200-300 cups a day and around 60-90k disposable cups in a year. And that’s just one company. Multiply it by hundreds of thousands of companies across the world, and the problem becomes huge!

One of the solutions could be employees bringing their reusable cups, but…

😫 Cleaning a mug at work is a chore.

😫 Who wants to empty a dishwasher at work?

😫 You probably have to use a toilet sink to wash your mug.

auum is solving this problem by making reusing simple. It has built a device that can clean, disinfect, and dry a glass in just 20 seconds. The device uses

💦 10 cl (3,4 oz) of water.

❌ And no chemicals.

Instead, it has built a patented technology that uses dry steam heated at 140°c (284°F). This makes cleaning simple, fun, and instant.

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That I Recently Discovered

🇺🇸 BeBot: A fully electric robot that can scan beaches for debris and remove it much faster than manual beach cleanups.

🇸🇪 Zivi: A car wash service that uses a sustainable waterless technique that uses only ~0.5 liters per wash.

🇺🇸 InventWood: Invented a new type of wood that’s stronger than steel.

🇮🇳 Boson Whitewater: Tackling water scarcity through transforming treated sewage water into potable water.

🇺🇸 Ground Control Robotics: Built a centipede-inspired robot that can go to any type of terrain to remove weeds.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

1️⃣ 🌡️ India's Big AC Energy Efficiency Push: India is taking a bold step to reduce energy consumption by mandating temperature limits on air conditioners. The government plans to restrict AC temperatures between 20-28°C, a significant change from the current minimum of 16°C. This initiative could lead to impressive energy savings — about 6% for each degree increase. With India's booming AC market of 1.4 million units sold last year, this regulation targets both households and commercial spaces. The Bureau of Energy Efficiency supports this move, particularly recommending 24°C as the ideal temperature for comfort.

2️⃣ 🌳 Colombia Makes Strides in Forest Protection: Colombia has achieved impressive progress in its fight against deforestation, with a significant 33% reduction in forest loss during Q1 2025. Deforestation dropped from 40,219 hectares to 27,000 hectares year-over-year, with the Amazon's national parks showing the most improvement. The government is also working on strengthening ties with Indigenous and territorial leaders to further boost conservation efforts.

3️⃣ 🌞 India's Clean Energy Revolution: India is transforming its energy landscape at an impressive pace. While still heavily dependent on coal, the country is actively shifting towards renewable energy, with coal's share in power capacity dropping from 60% to under 50% in just 11 years. In a remarkable achievement, India added 30 gigawatts of clean power between April 2024 and 2025 — enough to power 18 million homes. This transition is crucial, as India's growing middle class and increasing energy demands make it a key player in the global fight against climate change.

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Decathlon

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• This Supermarket Celebrates A Happy Hour Every Day

• Quiz Time!

• Startup of the Week: Tastewise

• 5 Brands That Are Making Bean-Free Coffee

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🥫 This Supermarket Celebrates A Happy Hour Every Day

S-market, a Finnish supermarket chain with 900 locations, has implemented an innovative solution to combat food waste through a strategic pricing system.

The initiative involves a two-tier discount approach: first, reducing prices by 30% during the day for items nearing their sell-by date, and then offering a steeper 60% discount during a designated 'happy hour' at 9 PM. This has multiple benefits:

🌍 Reduces environmental impact by preventing food waste and selling products that would otherwise be discarded

💰 Makes quality food more accessible by offering discounted prices to budget-conscious customers

📈 Benefits the business by allowing cost recovery rather than complete loss through charity donations

As of 2019, the initiative has proven successful, with many shoppers eagerly awaiting the final price reductions.

Note: I could not find any latest update on this. If you have ever used it, let us know about the experience in the comments below. Also, have you seen anything like this in your city?

Leave a comment

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

As the world uses more AI, we need more servers and storage systems. To house these servers and storage systems, we need more data centers. And to make these data centers, we need more cement, one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases. To tackle this problem, this tech company has agreed to purchase low-carbon cement from a cleantech startup, Sublime Systems, for its data centers. This low-carbon cement has 90% lower emissions than traditional kiln-made cement.

Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Tastewise

Wasted…When we think of food waste, most of us think about the food that we waste. That perishable food that has gone bad because we forgot to freeze it. Or probably the leftover food from our plates in restaurants. But the problem of food waste is much bigger than that. There’s also unsold food from retailers and supermarkets. Food that had expired before consumers bought it. Or probably new food products that companies launch, but they couldn’t find the right consumers for them. All that also adds up to the problem.

FoodGPT…Tastewise is using AI to solve a subset of this problem. It helps food brands, manufacturers, and restaurants make data-driven decisions to help reduce food waste.

But how does it do that…The company analyzes billions of social media posts, trillions of online recipes, and tons of reviews, grocery, and restaurant data to gather insights. It uses this data to give real-time insights to companies about what consumers really want. This helps these brands formulate accordingly rather than iterating and waiting for the customers to respond. Using AI just makes the entire process faster!

They must be doing something right since brands like Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Campbell’s have partnered up with Tastewise.

Something for everyone…Restaurants can use this solution as well. It would help them figure out the emerging food trends, popular dishes, and ingredient preferences. This allows them to quickly fine-tune their menus, leading to less food waste, more sales, and better profit margins.

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☕ 5 Brands That Are Making Bean-Free Coffee

But why do we need bean-free coffee? Well, I thought of writing, but this image does a better job at that:

🇳🇱 Northern Wonder: Made from ingredients such as lupin, chickpea, malted barley, and chicory. Available in a caffeine-free option.

🇺🇸 Voyage: Bean-free coffee made from water, roasted chickpeas, rice hulls, caffeine from green tea, and natural flavors.

🇺🇸 Minus: Instant beanless coffee that is plant-powered, has 86% less carbon emissions & uses 94% less water than traditional coffee.

🇸🇬 Prefer: Bean-free coffee made from rice and soy.

🇺🇸 Atomo: Using ingredients like carob and sunflower seeds to recreate the taste, aroma, and ritual of coffee.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

1️⃣ Climate Lawsuit Sets Legal Precedent Despite Dismissal

While a German court dismissed a Peruvian farmer's lawsuit against energy company RWE for climate change damages, the case marks a significant legal milestone. The ruling established that climate science can be used to determine legal liability for emissions-related damages. Legal experts note that this precedent-setting decision confirms that major greenhouse gas emitters can be held accountable for their climate impacts, even across international borders. This development could empower other affected communities to pursue climate justice through legal channels.

2️⃣ A Battery Revolution Helping Our Planet

A significant shift is occurring in electric vehicle technology as lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries gain prominence over traditional cobalt and nickel-based alternatives. According to recent IEA data, these environmentally friendlier batteries have grown from less than 10% market share in 2020 to nearly 50% by 2024. This transition is particularly beneficial for rainforest conservation, as it reduces the demand for cobalt and nickel, which are primarily mined in the rainforests of DR Congo and Indonesia. The IEA expects this positive trend to continue, marking a significant step toward more sustainable electric vehicle production.

3️⃣ Sri Lanka's Supreme Court Protects Wilpattu National Park

In a significant environmental victory, Sri Lanka's Supreme Court has concluded a 15-year legal battle by blocking plans to upgrade a road through Wilpattu National Park. Despite political pressure, including an election pledge to reopen the road, the court prioritized environmental protection over development. While the proposed road would have shortened travel times, it posed serious threats to wildlife through habitat fragmentation and increased risk of roadkill. This ruling exemplifies how judicial systems can safeguard environmental interests against development pressures that could harm protected areas.

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Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Microsoft

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• You Must Have Seen This Brand

• Startup of the Week: Odd.bot

• 5 Sustainable Brands That You Should Check Out

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌈 You Must Have Seen This Brand

Trippy patchwork of colors stuck together. That’s what defines Cotopaxi — an outdoor gear company.

If you haven’t bought anything from the brand ever (like me), I am assuming you would have seen someone carrying their backpacks or one of those insulated jackets.

If not, the bag below should give you an idea of how its products look.

Now here’s the interesting part. These multicolored patches are often made of deadstock. What is deadstock, you ask?

Think of all the leftovers from garment production. They could be excess fabric rolls, unsold merchandise, or even canceled orders. They mostly end up in landfills or are incinerated.

Cotopaxi uses this deadstock to create its vibrant collection of products!

In 2023, the brand worked with around 101,182 yards of leftover fabric — that’s roughly 1,000 football fields.

This prevents the deadstock from being wasted.

It also reduces the new clothes to be manufactured.

It helps Cotopaxi cut its costs and increase its bottom line.

While being circular and sustainable — a win-win formula!

Note: The brand sells in Australia, the EU, Japan, New Zealand, the US, and the UK.

⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: Odd.bot

This bot works autonomously, day and night, to remove weeds — a sustainable alternative to traditional chemical herbicides.

Weeds have been a perennial problem for farmers. To tackle that, they use chemical herbicides. In fact, billions of litres of them are used every year. But these herbicides can contaminate the soil, water, and air. They can even enter the food chain and affect all the species.

Odd.Bot is tackling this problem through its effortless, autonomous bot. It is a chemical-free weeding solution.

🤖 The bot works autonomously, day and night, removing young & small weeds with remarkable precision.

🤖 These bots are fully electric, so they don’t have any emissions.

🤖 The removed weeds can be used as manure, which further improves soil quality.

The brand operates on a pre-order model. So if you are looking to get one for your farm in 2026, you need to place an order now.

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That You Should Check Out

🇺🇸 Wonderfil: Creating a refill infrastructure to eliminate single-use plastic.

🇬🇧 Circulo: Making clothing repair as convenient & easy as buying new clothes.

🇮🇳 Verthbox: Transforming corporate gifting with memorable, sustainable, and purposeful gifts.

🇺🇸 Evolectric: Converting polluting diesel trucks into electric ones to cut down the pollution.

🇸🇪 Eco Wave Power: Turning the power of the ocean and sea waves into electricity.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌱 Green Revolution in Fertilizer Production

Talusag, an innovative startup, is transforming the traditional ammonia fertilizer industry with a greener, more cost-effective approach. While conventional fertilizer production relies heavily on fossil fuels and contributes nearly 2% of global CO2 emissions, Talusag is pioneering a solution using renewable energy to produce "green ammonia" from water and air. What makes this particularly exciting is that Talusag's modular systems can be placed closer to farms, reducing transportation costs and providing price stability for farmers. The company has already successfully implemented its technology at a nut farm in Kenya and raised $22 million in Series A funding.

🚗 Chinese EV Maker BYD Revolutionizes Charging Speed

BYD Co. has made a game-changing breakthrough in the electric vehicle industry with its latest innovation. Its new Han L sedan can charge enough in just five minutes to travel 400 kilometers (249 miles), making EV charging as quick as filling up a gas tank. The company is also committed to building over 4,000 charging stations across China to support its EVs. With this technology addressing one of the biggest hurdles to EV adoption — charging speed — BYD is making electric vehicles a more practical choice for everyday drivers.

🍄 From Legos to Sustainable Protein: A Factory's Green Transformation

In an innovative move, Swedish startup Millow is breathing new life into an old Lego factory by transforming it into a cutting-edge food production facility. The company will produce a groundbreaking oat and mycelium protein that boasts 97% lower emissions than beef. Set to be fully operational later this year, the 25,000 square meter facility will churn out up to 500kg of protein daily. What's particularly impressive is that by choosing to repurpose the existing building rather than construct a new one, Millow has prevented approximately 1,400 tonnes of CO2 emissions from being released into the atmosphere.

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Quiz answer: USD 1 Trillion

Today’s sustainable snapshot👇🏽

• Power Your Smartwatch Using Food Waste

• Startup of the Week: FAIRMAT

• 5 Sustainable Brands That You Should Check Out

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

⌚ Power Your Smartwatch Using Food Waste

Have you ever heard of Pomelo? It is the largest citrus fruit and is a natural, non-hybrid citrus species, native to Southeast Asia and Malaysia. It’s very similar in taste to grapefruit, if that helps.

Now Pomelo has a sweet, juicy flesh and thick, spongy peel. Researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered a way to transform the discarded pomelo peels to generate enough electricity to power devices such as calculators and sports watches without using batteries.

This prevents food waste and creates a sustainable power source.

Here’s how the technology works:

• Scientists freeze-dry pomelo peels to maintain their special 3D structure.

• The dried peel is combined with a plastic film to create triboelectric devices.

• In triboelectric devices, friction between two objects when they contact or slide against each other creates an electric charge.

While still in the research phase, the team is exploring other applications for pomelo peel and food waste materials for small-scale power generation.

If successful, this would eliminate millions of small batteries that end up as e-waste while reducing the impact of food waste.

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

Wild is a sustainable personal care company that makes refillable products such as deodorants and body wash. In April 2024, this London-based consumer goods company acquired Wild to foray into reusable packaging.

Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: FAIRMAT

Have you heard of carbon composites? These are made of carbon fibers. They are light & resistant, which makes them highly sought after. These carbon composites are used in:

✈️ Airplane parts

🚗 Cars

💻 Electronic devices

🏸 Sports Equipment

But what happens to them at the end of their lives? Well, they are either

🔥 Burnt using pyrolysis or,

🧪 Dissolved using solvolysis, a chemical process.

Both these processes have high emissions. That’s where FAIRMAT comes in. Through its process:

1️⃣ It cuts the carbon composite waste into small chips.

2️⃣ Reassembles them into sheets of material.

3️⃣ These sheets are then used to create new products.

These recycled materials can be used in electronics, sports equipment, and parts for cars and airplanes. This process recovers up to 90% of the waste material with 10 times fewer CO2 emissions compared to traditional methods. According to Fairmat, the brand is working on "infinity recycling," which would allow continuous recycling of these products without creating waste.

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That You Should Check Out

🇬🇧 Arborea: Industrializing the photosynthesis process to make sure everyone is fed.

🇩🇪 AIZOME: Bedsheets made without toxic chemicals and dyes.

🇮🇳 Wild Sunflower: Works with 200+ skilled artisans to build sustainable home decor products.

🇳🇴 Carbon Crusher: Solving the climate crisis by repairing our roads.

🇮🇳 Jiwya: A 100% plant-based slow fashion brand.

😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌪️ Blade Runner: Wind turbines are great for the planet, but they come with a set of their own problems. Their blades are made of glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP), and at the end of their life, it’s hard to recycle them. To solve this challenge, Washington State University engineers have developed an innovative recycling process that breaks down tough wind turbine blades into reusable materials using zinc acetate and hot water.

🪡 Stitch in Time: A growing movement is turning clothing repair into an act of rebellion against fast fashion, with groups like Edinburgh Street Stitchers leading public mending sessions to fight overconsumption. Extending clothes' life by 9 months can reduce their footprint by 30%. Besides that, mending is also seen as a meditative, community-building activity that helps people reclaim agency while fighting waste.

🔋 Battery Bounceback: As EV adoption rises, the challenge of sustainably sourcing battery materials has led to innovative recycling solutions. UK startup Altilium is pioneering a water-based method to recover valuable metals from used EV batteries. Governments across the EU and the US are also stepping in with policies to support this emerging industry and reduce dependence on problematic mining practices.

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Quiz answer: Unilever

Today’s eco snapshot👇🏽

• Japan Is Making Toilet Paper From This Surprising Material

• Startup of the Week: SecondShop

• 5 Sustainable Brands That You Should Check Out

• News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

• 3 Ways I Can Support Your Sustainability Journey

🧻 Japan Is Making Toilet Paper From This Surprising Material

The traditional toilet paper is made of virgin paper that comes from cutting down trees. On average, 700 million trees are cut every year just to make toilet paper. Plus virgin toilet paper requires 37 gallons (150 liters) of water per roll. That’s not sustainable by any standard.

Disposable diapers present another environmental challenge — they're the third-largest single-use consumer item in landfills. Once used, a diaper takes 500 years to decompose in a landfill. This means every diaper ever used still exists somewhere on Earth. Mind-boggling, right?

So Japan is tackling both problems together. Yes, you guessed it right — converting used diapers to toilet paper.

Before you get disgusted, these diapers are sterilized, deodorized, and bleached before being shredded into a pulp. They are then mixed with recycled paper and transformed into rolls of toilet paper.

Known as Shibushi Osaki Roll, the project is run by the city of Shibushi and the town of Osaki. A great solution that saves wood, waste, and water!

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⌛ Time for the quiz of the week

This fast fashion brand’s emissions from transport jumped by 10% in 2024. Reason: it used more flights to move clothes from factories in Asia to its stores globally.

Answer at the end of the newsletter. No one (including me) can see your response, so feel free to vote. 😉

✨ Startup of the Week: SecondShop

This Canadian brand is giving new life to returned goods.

Just Return It…Returning products has become incredibly simple these days. Wrong color or model? Return it. Found a better deal elsewhere? Return it. Product arrived damaged? Return it. While this flexibility is reassuring for consumers, it's not an environmentally friendly practice.

Another Chance…Many retailers struggle with handling returned products, often finding it more cost-effective to discard them than to resell them—a concerning practice. This is where SecondShop steps in, offering a solution by giving returned goods a second chance at life.

Win Win Win…SecondShop works directly with manufacturers and retailers to source returned products. They thoroughly test each item internally before listing it on their website. These products are offered at discounted prices, allowing customers to save money while contributing to environmental sustainability.

Have you seen a similar business model in your area/country?

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✅ 5 Sustainable Brands That You Should Check Out

• Airpaq: Bags from seat belts and airbags.

• Arani Ecosteps: A plastic-free store for personal care and household products.

• Cafide: Planet-friendly pet products made from upcycled material and vegan leather.

• ChopValue: Furniture made from discarded chopsticks.

• Mill: A kitchen bin that converts kitchen scraps into nutrient-rich food grounds for chickens.

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😹 News That Lifted My Spirits This Week

🌞 Solar Solstice: Cambridge-based Solstice is pioneering a creative funding approach for community solar projects by selling premium-priced renewable energy credits to corporate buyers like Microsoft. The program aims to fill the gap left by dwindling federal funding, with the surplus going into a fund that supports renewable energy initiatives in underserved areas. The initiative has already benefited several Massachusetts organizations, including Boston Medical Center and Worcester Community Energy Action.

⚡ Speed Demon: BYD is revolutionizing EV charging with a groundbreaking system that can add 292 miles of range in just 5 minutes — as quick as filling up at a gas station. Set to launch next month, this technology promises to outperform Tesla's Superchargers and could be the game-changer needed to convince hesitant drivers to switch to electric vehicles.

🌍 Green Britain's Brief: The UK hit a remarkable environmental milestone in 2024, with greenhouse gas emissions plunging 3.6% to their lowest levels since 1666. This dramatic reduction was achieved through several key initiatives, including shutting down the country's last coal-fired power station, embracing EVs (up 40%), and experiencing the cleanest electricity generation in history. The final tally showed emissions at 371m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, marking the lowest level since 1872.

💁🏼 3 Ways I Can Support Your Sustainability Journey

• If you’re a planet-friendly brand, I can help you with your blogs, newsletters, case studies, and whitepapers. Here’s some of my recent work

• If you would like to chat about anything related to sustainability and climate change, you can book a free call

• Do you want to be featured in this newsletter and on LinkedIn, where I write impactful stories (almost) every day? Just reply to this email, and I will send you the details

Give that 💚 a little tap if this edition helped you learn something new about sustainability and climate change. Have a good weekend, and see you next week :)

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Quiz answer: Zara